Several people in places
like
Detroit, Michigan got suspicious when employment ads
in local newspapers requested that their resumes should
be sent to a location in Dallas, Texas —on Pearl Street.
Without exception the people who sent resumes to Pearl
Street never got replies. It's as if their resumes were
being sucked into a
black hole.

For several months,
there were discussions on
Dice.com and
Indeed.com about the mystery of Pearl Street.
Eventually several very clever people on those message
threads pieced the puzzle together and figured out what
was happening to their resumes. More importantly they
cracked THE CODE. (Carrie's
Nation blog has a very good summary of the entire
story.

Job ads that contained
the Pearl St. mailing address aren't hard to find. They
are
sometimes posted on the
Department of Labor Job Bank and they often appear
in newspaper classifieds for private companies. (NOTE:
America's Job Bank is changing to
America's Job Exchange. A couple of examples follow
at the end of this article, and one of them was scanned
from the San Luis Obispo Tribune. [PDF])

One thing that these job
ads have in common: a job code at the end of each ad.
Sometimes it's very obvious because it's preceded with
the letters "ETA" which is short for the DOL
Employment and Training Administration. Look for the
bolded numbers in italics in the examples below.

The first question you
might be asking: what is at Pearl Street in Dallas
Texas? The answer:
Dept. of Labor ETA, an office that processes Labor
Certifications. This is their contact information:

Now that you know what
is at Pearl Street, your next question might be why
resumes are sent there?

Allow me to answer that!

These ads are run on
websites and newspapers to comply with the
Labor Certification Process for Green Cards to
"prove" that there are no Americans that are
qualified and/or willing to take the job. (Labor
Certification isn't needed for H-1B, L-1, or H-2B visas
since employers don't have to prove anything to hire
them.)

The process begins when resumes are received by the
DOLETA office (in this case on Pearl Street in Dallas).
They assign a case ID number that is based on the job
code. Resumes are then routed to the
employer's immigration attorney by referencing the
case ID. Usually it's the attorney who makes the
determination as to whether the US worker is qualified,
although sometimes it might be someone in the HR
department
like a trained human resources specialist.

Now that you know about
the job ads let's follow a few easy steps to crack the
job code.

1)The
first thing to do is to find job ads with job codes. A
couple of examples are provided below. The job code is
usually near the end of the job description. By
searching with Google, you will find no shortage of
them, and you can bet that there are similar ads for the
other ETA offices in the U.S. The easiest way to search
for these sham ads is to search for the address of the
ETA office. In the case of the Pearl Street office, the
Google search is done for
700 North Pearl St., Suite 510, Dallas, TX.

2)All
of these ads have a job code near the end of the
description. In "Example 1" below the Halliburton
ad has a job code of "D-05221-95808".

3)Once
you have the code go to this
DOLETA database search engine page to see the status
of the Labor Certification.

4)Plug
in the job code into the box called "labor code"
and then click search—most of the time you can copy and
paste the code. Be sure to have the code formatted as
required or you won't get any results. You must have a
"D-" in front of the number even if the ad
doesn't include it.

5)In
the case of Halliburton the results are as follows:

ETA Case Number: D-05193-13293
Processing Type: TR
Status: IN PROCESS

The status is rather
obvious—in this case it means the labor certification
for a visa is "in process". If you are curious
about the processing type, the best place to learn more
is the
Programmer's Guild page on
RIRs.

While doing these code
cracks it's very important to understand that
running sham ads to reject
qualified Americans is LEGAL. The DOL has no
authority to stop this practice because of the loopholes
in the law. So complaining about fraud will do no good
until the laws are changed. The
DOL functions as a rubber stamp which does nothing
much more than to facilitate the ruse.

Sure, you can mail in a
resume for one of those job ads. But if you are a U.S.
citizen, you will be rejected. Actually, you will be
rejected whoever you are—unless you are the alien who
the employer has already chosen to hire.

Labor certification is a
rigged game. And the losers are American workers.
Usually the foreign worker is already on the payroll
with an H-1B visa before the ads are run, so the job
position is already filled (that's almost always the
case if the processing type is RIR).

Either way the
processing type doesn't matter, because the employer has
no intention of hiring an American once they post the
phony job ads. Running an ad is a mere formality to
satisfy the loopholes in the law.

Hope all of you have
some fun by doing lots of code cracking. Here are two
examples of the ads.